LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.
Support independent authors! Scroll to the end for details.
< back | ⬆️ | next >0-12: Root Tech
√
The door cracks open, and from within a light flickers to life, blinding fluorescent shafts slicing through the darkness. Max shields his eyes from the glare, but not fast enough to avoid afterimages that make his head swim.
Blurry purple splotches fade slowly with each rub of his eyes. From the edges, a room ravels around him. And the lightly sweet smell of new electronics. Max can’t help but draw in a huge breath.
This can’t be real. So much tech. Max’s eye is drawn to one thing in particular—a flat screen monitor. He’d heard about them in stories handed down from before Damage, but he’d never seen one. At it’s thickest, it’s as wide as his thumb.
None of these were supposed to work anymore. The control circuitry was complicated enough to require a CPU, and all modern CPUs had become useless hunks of silicon. Or were supposed to be. Could someone have repaired these ones? Swapped out the guts with an 8-bit system?
Max had seen technological exceptions before. In the Fairchild camp, one of the traders claimed his brother constructed a 32-bit computer[9] entirely out of loose transistors, and it worked just fine. Of course, the thing occupied several square feet of space, and in rare moments when it wasn’t broken, ate through a set of perfectly good double-A’s in minutes. Not exactly commercial-grade engineering.
This screen looked professional. Slick injection molded plastic casing. No wires hanging out. Someone had put detail into fit and finish, and brought it to market. It wasn’t even dusty.
Max runs his hand along the plastic bezel. Smooth. An artifact from a different age.
Max steps back to take in the rest of the room, and notices more hardware based on the same precept. All four walls of this room are lined with desks, each of which is crammed with post-Damage computing hardware. There have been rumors that such things existed. It wasn’t possible—so the story goes—for this much advanced manufacturing to be online again and yet be kept a secret from everyone living in the camps.
Except that it was possible.
“There’s no bed,” Molly says.
“Excuse me?” Max asks, but as soon as the question is past his lips, he gets where she’s coming from. This isn’t an apartment—there’s no place to sleep. No food. Not even a bathroom. Whoever used this place had to come and go as needed.
“What is this place?” Max asks.
“You already said that,” Molly notes.
Which doesn’t make sense, but neither do most of the things Molly says. Max picks at an interesting-looking piece of equipment: a flat box with three lights on the front and two bulbous antennae on the back. “What’s this?” Max asks. He looks for a label on the back.
The instant his fingers make contact, the lights above flicker and pop. Then heavy silence congeals over the room.
The light shifts. Instead of harsh overhead illumination, there’s light coming from…well, Max can’t tell where the source might be. “Molly, are you there?” Max asks, but nobody answers. It’s utterly black in the room, but not dark. Like when Nolan’s screen shows solid black, but you can still tell that it’s on. Only one thing isn’t black: Max’s HUD. The lines are so faint that Max has to concentrate just to see them. He can make out the general shape of the room, the four corners in particular.
But then the stairsteppy lines sketching the room’s edges crumble into tiny pieces and noiselessly crash to the ground, where they shatter further into individual pixels that slide frictionlessly across the floor.
“Molly?” Max asks again, less certain. “Are you seeing this?”
The room is spinning very gently around Max’s head[10]. Vertigo brings Max to one knee, just to avoid falling over. Closing his eyes is no is help.
More of the world takes shape around him. A narrow ledge. Far above him, another. Max finds his feet and paces back and forth. He might tip forward or backward, but paling sideways off the edge doesn’t seem possible, as if there’s an invisible hand constraining him to two dimensions.
Max’s sense of proportion seems wrong. Everything seems flattened, and he can’t tell how far it is to the ledge above. He stretches toward it, and without warning he launches skyward, effortlessly jumping higher than his own height. He lands roughly, but it doesn’t hurt.
What’s going on? Max gapes at his hands. But they aren’t hands. They’re…
A dust of pixels scattered across the floor sweep into a whirlwind. Traces of color peek out from the television static. The swirling cloud grows dense and denser, until it takes on a physical presence, slightly taller than Max, and with arms, legs. A person.
The column of pixels grows denser and brighter, eventually forming into a life-size 8-bit avatar.
The resolution grows sharper, bit by bit, enough that Max can identify who this avatar represents.
It’s unmistakable. “Dad?”
Hadley Root clears his digital throat. He looks Max up and down. “Well. I was expecting someone a little more…capable,” he says. “Listen up: we have much training to get through, and not a lot of time to do it.”
footnotes
[10] Or at least it would be if he could see it which he can’t.
ℹ️ Support the author by purchasing your own professionally formatted paperback or Kindle version of this novel. Also, subscribe to get 3 free books.
Got feedback? 👍👎 All humans welcome to send email to my first name @micahjoel.info — put "8bitnovel" somewhere in the subject.
Copyright 2018, 2019 Micah Joel. All rights reserved.